For those that missed the press this week, the acquisition of MessageLabs by Symantec has officially closed.

We’ll be sharing more information here about changes and our SaaS/cloud strategies in the coming weeks and months. For now, I’d like to welcome our new colleagues and we look forward to the challenging, rewarding and copious work we have in front of us to continue to offer valuable services and solutions to our customers

More information about some of the future strategy can be found on our official acquisition site.

The press release can be found at the following link, or read it in full below the “More” link below.

Symantec completes acquisition of MessageLabs

Continue Reading…

Thanks to David Strom at Webinformant.tv, we have a new video review of Symantec Online Backup. David covers several topics, from preventing your PC from sleeping (a great tip!) to some of the areas we’re working to improve in the Online Backup service (like detailed progress information; expect a preview post on this soon).

Link to the review at Webinformant.tv

Alternate version at Metacafe (a Flash version if you have trouble viewing the embedded WMV version above)

Thanks David!

As this is my first post, please allow me introduce myself…

My name is Mark Alba and I work on the SPN team, responsible for partner product management.  You may be asking yourself, “What exactly is partner product management, Mark?” Or maybe you could care less.  At any rate, let me explain. Partner product management develops the business models and tools required by our channel partners to deliver software-as-a-service solutions to their customers.  We spend a lot of time with partners learning what works best for their business. We’re a listening bunch.  

With that introduction, I’d like to provide an overview of the SPN agency buying model currently used by our partners to deliver SPN services to their customers.  In future posts, I will discuss other buying models and would love to get your thoughts on what works best for your business.

The SPN agency buying model allows partners of all sizes to leverage the Symantec Protection Network platform for full automation of customer sign-up, service provisioning, monitoring and billing. The agency buying model was built to support the “customer acquisition” stage of the SaaS selling process, where customers are able to evaluate SPN services through the use of trial and low cost paid plans. As with any technology deployment, customers at the evaluation stage of a SaaS solution require partner support to extend the initial pilot into the rest of the customer organization. The agency model allows partners to build the value of the customer over time without incurring the order management costs required to support a limited, low dollar customer pilot. 

The following flow chart provides (a very high level) overview of the dynamics of the agency buying model.   

Partners transacting through the SPN Agency model are compensated based on a percentage of their customers’ revenue throughout the life of that customer using Symantec Protection Network services. Partners are paid monthly commission for the initial service purchase, service upgrades, renewals, and purchase of additional Symantec Protection Network online services.

If you are a partner and want to learn more about the SPN Partner Program, buying models or how to participate, check out our partner page.

http://www.symantec.com/partners/theme.jsp?themeid=spn.

Over at the Enterprise Strategy Group’s blog site there’s a great new video blog from Jon Oltsik about the Symantec and MessageLabs acquisition announcement. I’ve embedded the video below:

From my perspective, Jon was dead on about some of the goals we have with Symantec Protection Network:

• Supplementing a product based world: while Symantec has always had an extremely strong set of offerings for on premise solutions, we believe that service based delivery of our technologies is critical path for the future for us and our customers.
• Reduced acquisition/operating costs: I’ll refrain from using the “now, more than ever” form of this argument, but I think we can all agree that providing solutions that are less expensive to acquire and maintain is a worthwhile endeavor. By building a shared platform for our services, we hope to make it easier and cheaper for our customers, no matter what service they may need at a given time.
• Provide a complete portfolio: While I can’t say we’ll be able to serve every need of a small business (for example, I don’t think we’re going to provide online business card ordering), we do intend to provide as many of the information and asset protection services needed by our SMB customers and partners as possible. By adding a strong player like MessageLabs to the team, we continue to execute on that plan.

So thanks for the overview Jon, and I hope we can give you more interesting material in the future!

As an aside, I think the format of the talk is great, and reminiscent of the Steve Jobs “Chalk talk” videos making the rounds recently:

Some of you may have seen the press around our new Symantec Protection Network Partner program structure. Joe Panettieri provided a good overview of the changes here:

http://www.mspmentor.net/2008/10/16/symantec-launches-partner-program-for-saas/

If you’re part of the existing SPN partner program, you’ll be able to find more info soon in PartnerNet. If you’re not, or not yet a Symantec partner, you can easily sign up at PartnerNet ; membership is free, and you can get started quickly providing Symantec solutions to your customers, along with excellent training and other benefits.

For our current and future customers, if you’re not working with Symantec Protection Network through a partner, you may want to consider it as an option. Our partners receive technical training, get priority support, and can provide hands on management and other services in addition to helping provide your SPN service. Ask your current reseller, or look at our main page at http://www.spn.com to find other partners (click the “Find a Partner” link in the sidebar in the bottom content area).

We’ll have more information about our partner programs and promotions in the future, so stay tuned!

Today I’m very excited to share with you the news that we’ve added an extremely strong new offering to our Symantec Protection Network platform for the future.  We have announced that we’re acquiring MessageLabs, the leading provider of online messaging security. More info can be found at our official announcement page:

http://www.symantec.com/business/theme.jsp?themeid=messagelabs

As I’ve mentioned in the past, one of the key goals of SPN is to become the “one stop shop” for all of the security and protection services needed for your business. Adding messaging security is a natural progression for us, and as it’s no secret that email is a critical medium for almost any SMB, we see it as part of our responsibility to our customers to offer this kind of protection as part of a complete solution.

By adding MessageLabs’ 14 worldwide data centers, we are taking our first steps into international expansion. Being able to serve our customers in every region is important to us, and is another reason to look forward to interesting things from us in the future.

Moving forward, not only do we complement our technology portfolio and ability to reach customers, but we are lucky to have added a great team of people that have shown their knowledge and capabilities of delivering valued services in the SaaS space. The experience they bring will help us to continue to expand Symantec Protection Network into new services and markets, and I am really looking forward to being able to grow into them together.

(If you’ve not read the press release, you can catch it after the “read more” break below. )

Continue Reading…

Recent days have seen some interesting cloud and hosting related announcements, including Amazon’s announcement of Oracle databases available from AWS.

Now, hosted databases are not entirely new, with various methods having been offered in the past, but this marks a new form of easily customer-deployable (but yet still requiring management) solution, that can even leverage your existing Oracle licenses.

As the accessibility of these solutions advances, it raises a few questions around which I’d like feedback, if you’re considering (or have made) a move to hosted databases:

• Hybrid or pure deployment? - When you look at the architecture for using a cloud database, would you consider it as a primary resource, or to complement existing onsite deployments? Furthermore, would you migrate existing resources to the new hosted instances?
• Security - Now that your database resource is no longer within a firewall (or VPN), as many are, what new security measures will you be considering? Does this mean a new headache for you of deploying VPN resources into your cloud (or modifying usage models to use different protocols)? Or is this a moot point for the applications you are considering?
• Intended Usage - A significant number of AWS services are positioned around startups and web services that are bringing direct-to-the-market offerings to fruition. Do you fall in this camp, or are you considering AWS/Oracle for internal business use?
• Backup/long term archiving - Obviously, we believe in the reliability and promise of online backup, and Amazon has provided a solution for the Oracle instances using S3. Is this something you would consider as your primary means of backup, or supplement it by storing additional copies elsewhere, in the cloud or on premise?

As each day goes by, more and more of your primary data is starting (or has the opportunity) to move offsite, both in the form of unstructured data (like identity and general web app usage), and now more and more structured and critical data (like databases and file systems).  Having a backup copy of this data could mean the difference between a crisis or a nuisance in the case of a disaster, either on premise or off.

How is this changing model impacting your decisions around how to protect your data?

In this excellent discussion by Joseph Smarr of Plaxo, he touches on quite a few topics around social media and (perhaps more relevant to this blog) open identification and authentication technologies.

One of the challenges that every user (and developer) faces when implementing a new site or service is the question of identify and security.  How do you uniquely identify a user?

Common ideas:

• User names - great for personalizing, bad for scale (who wants to be coolguy43424?)
• Email addresses - great for unique identifiers, and easy to remember. Bad for portability. (What if I want to use different addresses at different sites, what if I change my email, or lose access to it?). SPN currently uses email addresses, and of course has the requisite abilities to update them or reset passwords when needed
• Random alpha/numeric identifiers - Not good for anything other than someone who likes randomizing algorithms…
• RSA or other cryptographic tokens - Users get a piece of hardware (usually a keyfob or similar) and it generates a code that they input into the website when they want to login.  Great for spy movies and highly secure datacenters, no real penetration in the personal/SOHO space.

Some up and comers:

• Phone numbers  - generally cell phone numbers, and generally used for social networking or SMS enabled services. Same basic issues as using email addresses
• OpenID - Gaining a lot of popularity, allows you to associate yourself to an OpenID provider (for example get one from Yahoo.com) and then any site that supports OpenID can “handshake” to your OpenID provider and let you login without creating a new set of credentials. Currently it suffers from a bit of usability, but this is changing, and security has yet to be fully proven.  I’d like to do a follow up post on OpenID in the future to delve into a bit more detail
• Oauth - Less of an “identity” provider and more of an authentication mechanism between sites and applications to allow the exchange of data without having the user “log in”.

While SPN is not a social networking application, it is a platform that will continue to grow and provide many additional and varied services. As more users come aboard, and start to use our services in conjunction with other providers and services, we want to ensure that you are able to easily subscribe and integrate our services into your daily routine.

So I’d like to hear from you. What are your thoughts on the new wave of identity services? How would you and your users (and customers, for our partners) to authenticate to SPN in the future? Would you find it useful to automatically be able to import user and profile information from other services?

Ok the wordplay was bad, but the news is great!

Along with the launch of the Online Remote Access service, we’re announcing support for Windows Vista with our Online Backup service. We’ve had a lot of requests from our customers to get Vista support out there, and it took a little bit longer than anyone liked, but we wanted to make sure it was as reliable and stable as our existing Online Backup agent.

For current subscribers, just add a new computer to your account and the new agent you download will now support Vista; for potential subscribers, I encourage you to sign up for a trial at https://signup.spn.com and see if the service is a fit for you.

Thanks for your patience while we worked to deliver this; we have lots more in store and I can’t wait to talk about it over the coming months!

(P.S. for those that aren’t used to using RSS to subscribe to blogs, you can easily subscribe to get an email update when new posts are made here. Just click the “Email” link and icon in upper right hand corner of the sidebar and you’ll be good to go!)

Update: For those asking about what happens when you upgrade an XP machine to Vista, just make sure you try and run LiveUpdate before or afterwards. If your agents have been online they should be automatically updated anyway, but you can do a manual update if you want to be certain.

Welcome to Symantec Online Remote Access!

Hello – my name is Mike Baldwin, and I’m a member of the team of product managers here at Symantec that is responsible for Symantec Protection Network. I’m quite excited to be posting one of the first blogs on our new Symantec Protection Network blog page. As you may be aware at this point, and as Richard has described in his blog, Symantec Protection Network is the name we’ve given to the online platform from which Symantec is able to offer multiple subscription services. Launched earlier this year, the first services offered on the Symantec Protection Network platform were Online Backup and Online Storage for Backup Exec. You can learn more about Symantec Protection Network and all of the available services at www.spn.com.

As of today, I’m extremely pleased to help introduce the public beta program for our newest service: Symantec Online Remote Access.

What is Online Remote Access?

So - for this first blog post, I’d like to spend a little time talking about what specifically this new service is. For future blog posts, I’ll get more into common (and unique) use cases, useful tips, and other specific topic discussions suggested by you – but first let’s start at the core.

Online Remote Access is an online service based on the concept of “remote control”, literally meaning that it enables users to securely connect to, take control of and fully interact with a computer in some other location. That other location can simply be across the room or down the hall, it could be on the other side of the country or even the globe. In any case, the technology creates the user experience of being physically present at the remote computer – and thereby enables that user to work on the computer when they can’t be (or don’t want to be) actually there in person. Said differently, it allows users to make their data and applications available to themselves ”on-demand”, thereby saving those users and their companies a great deal of time and money. Continue Reading…